Toledo Reporter

At The University of Akron (UA), a top public urban research institution, Dr. Hossein Tavana, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, is collaborating with a research team at the University of Michigan to understand how breast cancer cells that metastasize to bone survive for many years before being “triggered” to grow, and what fuels their growth to form metastatic tumors. The results could provide greater insight into how to prevent the lethal recurrence of the disease, thus lowering the mortality from breast cancer. The research is being funded by a $2.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense that was awarded in summer 2022.

The contributions to cancer research that Tavana and his Tissue Engineering Microtechnologies research group make is to create tissue engineered models of breast tumors to help understand disease mechanisms, improve drug testing, and discover more effective anticancer drugs.

This time, for a project that only began a few months ago, they’re trying to understand the specific mechanisms that keep breast cancer cells dormant in bone and what helps them grow. It could be a process similar to stem cells, where stem cells remain dormant and start growing when they receive a signal that they’re needed to work in the body and regenerate or repair a tissue.

Original source can be found here.